• by Larissa Faw , March 20, 2015

With ad buying increasingly moving from a focus upon "media" to "audience," Starcom MediaVest Group is globally expanding its Pace Panel, a proprietary global consumer knowledge platform that combines media usage data in context with custom research and convenience panel capabilities as well as data collected via mobile devices.

Specifically, the platform is based on an opt-in eDiary that collects information on location, social settings, activities, media usage and emotions every half hour, and also passively tracks the activities of mobile device usage. It is then connected with and integrated in SMG’s audience management platform in order to synch with all other data sets.

In addition, the Pace Panel provides custom research opportunities with re-contact questionnaires and custom panels, which provide marketers with new ways to generate rich understanding and measurement across niche targets for product development or concept testing as well as media planning and activation.

The concept was developed with RealityMine, provider of mobile market research technologies and consumer analytics, and is powered by TouchPoints, a syndicated consumer insights and cross-platform research products designed to inform integrated communications, strategy, planning and execution.

“SMG’s Pace Panel provides the contextual data that ensures we place messaging and content that will generate reach with as much relevance to the consumer journey and as close to the point of purchase as possible,” said Kate Sirkin, EVP, global director of Audience and Measurement Solutions at Starcom MediaVest Group.

“Furthermore, this single-source data set and platform offers a rich understanding of how time and place can improve message relevance in specific categories,” added Sirkin.

SMG is already using the Pace Panel in the US and UK and now plans to expand the panel to an additional 20 markets — including Canada, Australia, India and Russia — by the end of 2015.